The present invention relates to an optical fiber contact assembly, and more specifically to an optical fiber contact which forms part of an assembly described and claimed in co-pending U.S. application entitled "Optical Fiber Contact Assembly", this application being filed concurrently herewith. The contact is used for terminating an optical fiber to be optically connected to a second optical fiber similarly terminated.
Numerous optical fiber connection assemblies have been proposed in the prior art with each possessing several disadvantages. In particular, most assemblies require the craftsman to align a fiber to be connected with a contact, this being often times extremely difficult because of small tolerances involved when trying to precisely position an optical fiber core within the contact. Not only is the craftsman responsible for the precise positioning, the craftsman is also required to epoxy the optical fiber to be terminated within the contact, and is furthermore responsible for carefully preparing an end of the optical fiber after it has been epoxied within the contact so that a good optical surface exists to be matable with another contact. Furthermore, the craftsman is required to control intermating dimensions between first and second contacts expoxied to first and second fibers to be connected. Such procedures are extremely craft-sensitive and hard to reliably and repeatably perform in the field where specialized equipment accessible in the laboratory is often not available, making connections with prior art connection assemblies inherently unfavorable.
Other types of connection assemblies incorporate either liquids, greases, or lenses as part of an interface construction between contacts to be mated, the disadvantage with liquids being the possibility of contamination and spillage, with the problem of lenses being related to complexity of design of the fiber and lens interface as well as poor resistance to radiation since lenses often turn black when irradiated.